Agua Mala

Or, that time I ran into some jellyfish in Cuba

Feb 04, 2025

Once upon a time, I went to Cuba. If you’re wondering, Marissa why did you go to Cuba? You speak French not Spanish. Great question the answer is I wanted to go to Cuba.

I visited in 2017 with a group named the Cuba Writers Program. As the name implies, there was reading, and there was writing, so this is the perfect purview of Chaotic Reading. Also, one of my writing professors, Tim Weed1 ran the group and I trusted him and as I no hablo español (more on that later), I felt more comfortable traveling with a group. Especially to a country where I didn’t speak the language and especially to a country where the Treasury Department had certain restrictions on why you could travel there.2

The plan was simple: fly into Havana, spend a few days exploring the city and its environs, then head south to Cienfuegos.

Havana was many things: bright and hot and full of so many colors. The buildings were painted in pastels and there were as many classic cars around as you could imagine. We had group lectures at night to talk about the history of Cuba, where I learned how the Cubans were incredibly proud of their Revolution, and that the first thing they did after overthrowing the Batista regime was pull the parking meters out of the ground.

Most Cubans were also incredibly friendly and willing to talk to Americans. I’m aware I’m generalizing, but this was my experience. When asked which tourists he preferred, Europeans or Americans, our tour guide said the Americans. We gently made fun of him - of course he’d like the people who actually tipped. No, he said, it was because the Americans talked. They were much more likely to engage in conversation, and that was more fulfilling.

I went to the Hotel Nacional, Ernest Hemingway’s apartment in Havana, Ernest Hemingway’s house, Finca Vigia, (which was delightful and also overrun with cats), and the Museum of Decorative Arts, where I saw Will Smith and his entourage walk by. I didn’t get a photo because I was walking through the museum backwards, and so missed all the galleries being shut down so Will Smith and Co. could peruse undisturbed. Ergo, when I walked through a closed door and right by them, I was completely unprepared. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

We ate dinner as a group, went to dance schools and community art projects, and talked with local authors about whether their work was impacted by governmental censorship. In a word, yes, but there was always ways to get their stories out.

There was so much art available for purchase, and I bought a lot of it. After all, the thinking went, if you weren’t going to make a lot of money no matter what you did, you might as well do what you love. A trip member and I ‘chartered’ a classic car for a drive, which took us to Plaza de la Revolución and Colon Cemetery. (I wrote about that cemetery here.) Throughout all of this, I spoke what I called ‘Hack Spanish.’ I’m fluent in French, and had been doing Italian on Duolingo for years, and just threw in Spanish. With the combination of all three of those Romance languages floating around in my head, I tried to communicate. It was not good. My spoken Spanish was terrible, despite having four years of elementary school instruction and some core Spanish words that will never leave my head.3 Despite this, folks in the group deferred to me, which confused me all the more.

Case in point for proving how bad my Spanish was and that I’m not exaggerating: while waiting at baggage claim in Havana, I listened to the folks around me, trying to pick up words. They kept saying ‘Mira, mira’ and pointing during their conversations. My dumbass thought: Not everyone here can be named Mira, that’s gotta mean something else. Yeah, mirar - which is the Spanish verb for ‘to look’ and a real common one at that. Another fun fact: this is 100% where my main character’s name comes from.4

After five days of soaking in everything that I possibly could in Havana, our group boarded a bus for Cienfuegos. Here, my memories start to blur and I remember things out of order. We went to lunch by the water, and went to a former sugar plantation. There was an art gallery, and a tour, and then an art market with lots of vendors and stalls. There was a rooftop guitar concert, the sun shining and warming the back of my neck. There was blue everywhere. The harassment I endured in Havana unfortunately continued in Cienfuegos, and I was followed in broad daylight as I went to a nearby hotspot for wifi.5 Thankfully, I ran into three other women from the group and my pursuer left.

And then, there was the agua mala.

In my mind, it was the first day we were in Cienfuegos, but I don’t think that’s right. I think it was day 2 or 3. I think Day 1 we went to Playa Giron, the actual Bay of Pigs. It doesn’t matter, though. What matters is that we went to a resort on the water for the afternoon. The water was a crystal clear blue, sharper than anything I had seen before. There was a light breeze, and once again, beautiful sunlight.

Some of our group elected to stay by the pool, while the rest of us opted for a short hike. There was a cave, where we’d return to post swim to look for bats. We found them, and they were very cute.

But before the bats, we exited our minor spelunking exercise to find a beautiful blue lagoon. This isn’t even an exaggeration - look at it.

There was a ladder down to the water, and we jumped in. We shared snorkeling gear, and I saw fish swimming about. I can’t see without contacts to save myself, so I was careful to not get water in my eyes, doggy paddling around. The water was so warm and clear, there was no reason not to luxuriate in it. I do remember at one point thinking, Why does the water hurt? but thought nothing of it. Later, as I emerged and asked our guide why the water hurt, he mentioned it was probably sea nettles, as they were common in the area. Someone had hand sanitizer and so we rubbed it on our skin to counteract the stinging. We saw the bats, went on our way, and thought no more of it.

At the time, I was reading Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, the first in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy. The night after my swim, I slept poorly. Barely 5 hours, if my memory of what my FitBit said serves. I tossed and turned, cold in the air conditioning, dreams plagued with Tudor style executions and falcons and Thomas Cromwell. Truly the stuff of nightmares.

I shuffled to the bathroom in the morning, bleary eyed and grumpy, and turned the light on. I saw my reflection, and blinked. I took my glasses off, cleaned the lenses, put them back on, and blinked again. Nope, same image.

My skin was covered in red bumps - hundreds of them. Along my neck and my jaw, the entire surface of my skin was red and inflamed. Where my bathing suit had been was covered, too. Hundreds and hundreds of bumps and they hurt.

I was sharing a room with another young woman, and I heard her rousing. We had bonded over being the youngest ones on the trip, and she, too, knew another one of the instructors. I walked out of the bathroom to confirm to my roommate that I was indeed seeing what I thought I was seeing. Her eyes bulged.

It was Cuba, and it was May, which meant that regardless of whether I was in New England or Cuba it was spring weather and I had no scarfs or sweaters or anything to cover the absolute infestation of my skin. I had Motrin on me, but that was about it, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on. As someone with a panic disorder, this is a great headspace to be in.

We were staying in casa particolares at this point in the trip (history lesson to follow), and my roommate and I emerged from our room to the courtyard for breakfast. I brought the one sweatshirt I had with me and hiked it up to my chin, hoping to hide the devastation beneath. Ann Hood, one of the instructors on the trip, and her husband Michael Ruhlman were staying in this particular casa as well. Michael emerged first, and came and sat down with us at the table. We were all quiet.

After a moment, he looked up at me.

“Did you go swimming yesterday?”

“Yes,” I said, “why?”

“Did your skin-”

I could have cried in relief. Sea nettles my ass. This was agua mala.

We compared notes, and as we gathered with the rest of the group later that morning, we took stock. Out of our group of 20 people, 14 of us were afflicted with the red bumps. In the end, I got away relatively unscathed; I was only in the water for about 20 minutes. Michael, among others, was in for upwards of 45 minutes. There was no mistaking the redness on their skin.

Tim was incredibly apologetic; he had never seen anything like this on any of his trips to Cuba. We eventually learned the culprit: agua mala.6

What is agua mala, you might ask? Well, agua mala is jellyfish larvae - hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of invisible jellyfish larvae just…hanging out on the surface of the water. I was swimming through jellyfish. No wonder the goddamned water hurt. There was no way to know they were there because they were so small as to be practically invisible. The irony of snorkeling through that crystal clear water was not lost on anyone.

Brief history lesson: when the USSR collapsed in the early 90s, the Cuban economy went through a gigantic contraction. The Soviet Union, after all, was the main trade partner of Cuba. People were literally starving, so the government decided to loosen some of the restrictions on small businesses. You could open a restaurant if it had no more than 12 seats, and you could open a bed and breakfast - a casa particolare- if it was in your home and it was just a room or two. After all, people still traveled within Cuba itself and needed somewhere to stay.

Because of the embargo, Cuba is not like the US. You can’t just ~go~ to CVS. All medicine needed to be brought into the country with you. Meaning: I had brought no Benadryl with me (not thinking I’d need it because my allergies generally consist of sneezing) and had nowhere to procure it. I had stomach drugs for days, but no antihistamines. Thankfully, a few other people had Benadryl cream and pills, and we shared because we were all miserable.

Post agua mala, we were supposed to go to an old Soviet style resort for the day, but the majority of us outvoted this because no one wanted to go anywhere near water any time soon. Plan B included going to some guy’s house, called the Casa del Zun Zun, and then lunch.

The Casa del Zun Zun was lovely; the Zun Zun is the world’s smallest bee hummingbird and is no bigger than a human thumb. I don’t remember the entire context as the Benadryl was beginning to take hold, but I believe this man’s backyard had the right plants/environment/ecosystem to support a lot of these lil guys, and so you could see many of them hanging out. I think he converted his backyard into a little sanctuary and accepted donations, but again: Benadryl.

Next, we went to lunch. Tim had never been to the restaurant, but you’ve got to be flexible when you’ve got 14 people covered in hives from a freak jellyfish attack who are now deathly afraid of water.

I wish I could remember the name of the restaurant - I really do. I remember the chef, who was so welcoming and how they had cats living in the rafters of the restaurant. The cats would not accept fish if you gave it to them; you had to throw it up for them to fetch out of the air. Not health code compliant, but very cute.

I also had the best crab of my life there. I’m a sucker for crab, at a friend’s wedding later in 2017, I’d follow a waiter with crab puffs around during cocktail hour, because who needs lobster when you can have crab?! Anyways, the crab made me cry it was so good (and again: Benadryl). We were told that the crab was made with four ingredients: olive oil, garlic, tomatoes and salt. Yeah right, I thought, even if I knew how to cook crab, it’d never turn out like this. After lunch, we drove back to Havana.

I should mention that interspersed throughout this trip were workshops - daily. We read each other’s work, we commented on it, we had feedback sessions in some of the most picturesque settings imaginable. It’s just that the writing part had absolutely nothing to do with the agua mala.

I guess the moral of the story is don’t swim in jellyfish infested waters. But sometimes you swim in jellyfish infested waters because you don’t know they’re jellyfish infested waters, and then have to change course and make the best of it.

A week after we got back to the States, our agua mala returned. It’s apparently perfectly normal for the jellyfish stings to recede and then itch about a week after incurring them, and we were all lamenting the sudden onset of extreme discomfort in our shared Facebook group. At least at this point I had copious hydrocortisone cream on hand. The Benadryl had made me feel entirely too loopy, and no one wants a software trainer who giggles ever 5 words.

At the time, partly agua mala influenced, I didn’t think I’d go back to Cuba. I thought I was good. But now, I’d be interested to go back, see how both it and I have changed. On my layover back to Boston, I had a few hours to peruse the Charlotte airport. It was an assault on my senses. I’m not going to wax rhapsodic about the Castros, but there is something to be said about not being assaulted by advertising and the culture of consumerism 24/7. I wasn’t even aware of how much advertising I was exposed to on a daily basis until I went to Cuba.

I walked around the airport, itching my stupid agua mala bites, looking around like I was possessed. Why were there so many ads? Why were they so big? Where were the walls??? Since 2017, I have harbored a deep aversion to advertising, and am now deeply suspicious of it. What’s that saying, leave only footprints, take only memories? The agua mala bites left, but the lessons of Cuba lingered far longer after they went.7

The Chaotic Reader

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